Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

Ending months of speculation, former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke told a television station in his native El Paso that he is joining the race for president, and plans to make a formal announcement on Thursday morning, before launching his campaign with a three-day trip to Iowa. “I’m really proud of what El Paso did and what El Paso represents,” O’Rourke said in a text to KTSM, an NBC affiliate. “It’s a big part of why I’m running.

In a historic executive ordersignedWednesday morning, California Gov. Gavin Newsomimposed a moratorium on executions and ordered the death chamber at San Quentin Prison — unused following a $853,000 renovation a decade ago — closed. “We are, as I speak — as I speak — shutting down, removing the equipment in the death chamber at San Quentin,” Newsomsaid at a press conference at the state capitol in Sacramento.

Outgoing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the very embodiment of triangulating, neoliberal politics going back multiple generations, is leaving office with the political movement he rode to power in tatters. Last week, Chicago voters dealt both him and his political ideology a searing rebuke, as progressive women of color swept key local elections, unseated a city council member with close ties to the mayor, and sent two progressive black women into the runoff to replace Emanuel.

Mark Meadows, the chair of the conservative Freedom Caucus, wants to end Super PACs. Meadows voted against House Democrats’ sweeping ethics and reform bill, which passed the chamber Friday morning on a party-line vote. But there were parts of it he agreed with, the North Carolina Republican told The Intercept. One thing he supported, Meadows said, was the effort to reform election finance.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks during the Bloody Sunday commemorative service at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Ala., on March 3, 2019. Photo: Chris Aluka Berry/Reuters Last Sunday in Selma, Alabama, Hillary Clinton opened a speech at the Brown Chapel AME church with a Bible verse. “This is the day the Lord has made,” she began. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it. And then let’s get to work.

A startup founded by a young and outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump is among the latest tech companies to quietly win a contract with the Pentagon as part of Project Maven, the secretive initiative to rapidly leverage artificial intelligence technology from the private sector for military purposes. Anduril Industries is the latest venture of Palmer Luckey, the 26-year-old entrepreneur best known for having founded the virtual reality firm Oculus Rift.

Barack Obama campaigned on the promise to close the Pentagon-operated prison at Guantánamo Bay. Donald Trump, on the other hand, campaigned to fill the prison base back up. From the January day 17 years ago when the first prisoners arrived until today, two things have remained remarkably consistent: The prison at Guantánamo Bay remains open and reporter Carol Rosenberg has been covering it.

The 2016 presidential election was won and lost in three states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And Democrats’ hopes of retaking the White House ride right back through them. The pivotal rolethose states play gives local elections there outsized importance, as the infrastructure built can then support a presidential candidate who comes through later. Had Hillary Clinton lost rural voters by the same margin that Barack Obama had lost them, she’d have won the White House.

Nick Estes did not intend to write a book about Standing Rock. He was working on his dissertation about Indigenous rights at the United Nations when the movement against the Dakota Access pipeline exploded on the edge of one of the 16 northern Plains Indian reservations of the Oceti Sakowin people, known by the U.S. government as the Sioux. Estes, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe who grew up in South Dakota, felt he had little choice but to change his plans.

Photo illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty ImagesTry to imagine for a moment a declaration from Congress to the effect that safeguarding the environment is important, that the effects of pollution on the environment ought to be monitored, and that special care should be taken to protect particularly vulnerable and marginalized communities from toxic waste. So far, so good! Now imagine this resolution is enthusiastically endorsed by ExxonMobil and the American Coal Council.

Democrats and progressive groups across the state of New York are pushing back hard against an effort to ban fusion voting, a system that allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate. The assault, according to those on the receiving end, is being driven by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ongoing hostility toward the Working Families Party, which has been a primary beneficiary of fusion voting in the state.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer listen to the State of the Union address on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 30, 2018. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/APGOP Congressman Steve King has served in the U.S.

Eight members of Congress have taken a pledge to work to bring ongoing U.S. global military conflicts to a “responsible and expedient” end, the result of a first-of-its kind lobbying effort by military veterans on Capitol Hill. The pledge was written and organized by a group called Common Defense, made up of veterans and military families,which advocates for scaling back U.S. military commitments overseas.

Across the world, the reputation of elites and their institutions is in free fall. A flood of online information has given the public unprecedented access to elite individuals in politics, media, academia, science, business, and an array of other fields. Thanks to tools like social media, the activist public has greater proximity to its supposed mandarin class than ever before.Innumerouscases, what this newfound intimacy has revealed has not been flattering.

On January 12, 2016, Yuli Novak called her staff of a dozen people together in their Tel Aviv offices to reveal the identity of a spy who had infiltrated the organization. At the time, Novak was the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli anti-occupation group that collects testimonies of Israeli soldiers operating in Palestinian territories. She informed the staff that a man calling himself “Chai” had been secretly videotaping them.